The Build Up
by freakypencils
Summary: A speculation as to what would have happened if Maria Clara had been alive long enough to be rescued from the convent. A lot of touchy-feely angsty fluff. Simoun/Maria Clara from El Filibusterismo.
1. Prologue

"And who might that be?"

Edgar pointed to a long-haired stranger, eyes framed in tinted spectacles as he wove slowly and menacingly through the crowd in his almost thespian attire.

Guadalupe turned to see. "Ah, he's a real character," she said. "An American jeweler; apparently he just came back from the Philippines."

"What's his name?"

"Sam. No, wait, Si— something exotic. Simoun. Yes, that's right. Simoun."

"And his company?"

Guadalupe's forehead wrinkled upon seeing the lady at Simoun's arm, matching raven hair tied up in a bun with a golden comb. The shimmering blue-green of her Oriental-style dress made her look like a dragon in comparison to the man beside her who wore a very Western ensemble of a copper vest and red cravat.

"Oh," said Guadalupe. "I… I'm not sure."

* * *

><p>The curtains waved slightly in the cold air. The windows were opened only a crack, letting in a silver strip of moonlight that cut into the bleak darkness of the room.<p>

He'd been used to this kind of dark. His time in Europe had seasoned him that way after a youth lived in the sun.

"Crisostomo," a sigh, tired and cautious, called out to him for help as it tried to grip through the shadow. It was help he had forsaken her for so long and now would do anything to repay.

He called back, "Maria," And navigated the space to find her out of the washplace, thin as a bird and draped in a nightgown she managed to swipe from the convent.

Simoun led her to the bed, seating her carefully as if she were to break any moment now. He knew now, however, she was a lot more than that.

"I'm sorry," she said, suddenly.

He knelt at the foot of her bed, encasing her face and shoulders in his wiry grip. "Whatever for?"

"I shouldn't have called you that."

He shook his head and reassured her, "You can call me anything."

"I know how it feels to be made to remember things," she said, shaking. "I've been made to do… many _terrible_ things at the convent, Simoun…"

"No need for that…" he whispered, holding her close.

"I didn't think you would forgive me…"

Simoun took her face again and kissed her forehead as she began to weep. "I will forgive you whatever you do. I have done many terrible things myself… and I have waited so long to hold you again, and I will not let anything keep me from being with you as I loved you years before."

She told him she loved him and he replied that he loved her back. He didn't wish to let go; not for a while.


	2. Chapter 1

He was hunched over the desk, scribbling absentmindedly as the lamplight flickered in the open wind and sent shadows sputtering across his chiseled, weary face and the depths of the dimness of the dismal little flat.

He looked up, dark eyes straining for rest, and his hand involuntarily reached up and slipped off the spectacles. Almost immediately they darted toward her picture, the one he had kept on his old table at his former home and had taken before he fled for remembrance.

He needed much more than her memory. In fact he despised it at first, trying to burn out of his mind the pains of having to remember her in his every waking hour. He wished to stop thinking about her altogether, but to no avail. She was staying – or at least, the ghost of her, her countenance emblazoned in his head as if the very portrait that stared blankly, yet with eyes he knew so well, was the branding iron heated in the fire his house had burned down with.

Now that blank stare dissolved into a plea, a call as sad as the song she sang that happy, careless day they rode across the lake. Help, it said, rescue me from the sorrows of this world and its morose, heavy silence, as burdening as a yoke while the bricks of this cruel convent weigh around me less like the succor of God and more like a prison.

He gazed at that picture for a long time, not looking away to shake himself out of it. The light wavered again, and again the gloom danced around her face and for a split second he thought he saw it move – a laugh, a smile, a spark, it was too quick to tell – and when it didn't happen again he knew he had to do anything to get it back.

"This is for her," he whispered to himself. "It always was."

"Are you sure about this, sir?" Basilio looked up at the jeweler, whose eyes were still obscured under the night blue of his glasses.

He did not reply.

"Sir," Basilio repeated, only louder.

Simoun only nodded and uttered a yes, not taking his gaze away from the building in front of him. The convent stood, tall and officious, a jeering hypocrite under its mask of celibate habits, just like the _Padres_ who dwelt in it.

He took a step forward from the shadow of the stone building they hid under; Basilio did not dare touch him.

Slowly and deliberately, he raised a sinewy arm. At its end was a pistol, cocked and ready. Simoun breathed once, long and deep, and stared hard at the brick imposition in front of him.

Before he knew it,

_BANG._

His arm shook. Revolutionaries zipped past him, shouting in a sudden deluge of adrenaline. As soon as the trance left him, he ran, faster than any of the others, his own excitement getting the better of him.

Basilio, who had come out first after the shot, watched as the jeweler rushed forward into the convent.


	3. Chapter 2

Sister Maria sighed as she looked out her window. The night was quiet, almost burdensome in its silence while the lamplight sputtered in its aberrant dance. It was acceptably cool, yet no wind penetrated where she was. The windows were shut, as was on most of her nights.

She learned early in her days at Santa Clara there was as much hope finding herself out there, free again, as there was the moon falling out of the sky. As much as there was hope knowing _he_ was no longer around. She learned to be callous to the sheer, sharp and cruel chill of her surroundings; to the pain that, throbbing, penetrated her mind – a memory as cold and pointed as a knife – as much as it howled on her skin like wounds fresh from flogging.

What was tonight compared to any other night that she wished someone would take her away. Maybe, she thought long before, maybe God would have enough mercy to spare her from any more of this hurt and give her something. A sign. A plague.

But now there was no God. She lived in a convent, under an oath of silence, wrapped in a habit she did not stop weeping into since she acquired it. And she no longer believed in God.

BANG.

Something echoed in the near distance that made her jump. The clean, blunt, loud cry of a gunshot – then, shouts. First, the deep, choral ones of men – tens of them, maybe hundreds, maybe more – then the high-pitched murmur of her fellow sisters.

Instinctively, she reached under her bed, pulled out a _bayong_ with all her belongings neatly stuffed inside, and slipped out of her room and the residential corridor.

She wove through the corridors and staircases like she built the convent herself.

For the first time, exhilaration filled her frail body and she hurried down the steps, newly-freed. The shouts of the other _madres_ pulled at the back of her head as they bounced off the walls, but they did not hinder her. Instead she felt as if they pushed her forward, down into the base of Santa Clara and out the back door.

She had almost reached the lobby when something – someone – obstructed her: a familiar, tall, thin figure dressed neck to feet in black. It gazed down at her with old, bespectacled eyes, menacing and hungry and snakelike. She looked back up at them with a surprise and fear that masked hatred and hardness that she felt boiled up within her only now.

"Where do you think you're going?" asked Padre Salvi.

She didn't reply.

"You cannot possibly think of leaving the convent," he continued. "There is a revolution happening as we speak."

Again she was silent.

"Poor, vulnerable Sister Maria," he sighed, and clicked his tongue. "Come with me; you won't be safe here."

He raised a long, thin hand to her face, but before it could make contact with her cheek she swatted it away.

Padre Salvi's eyes, from their previously deceptive state, suddenly bared an anger that skimmed down into his other hand, whose fingers closed around Sister Maria's wrist and began to pull at it harshly.

"Never again!" she began to shout, her own anger rising in her throat and out her lips as she spat at him in her broken, livid, irrepressible state.

"So the little bitch finally bites!" Salvi sneered. "You've kept quiet all this while just to burst out all too late, I'm afraid."

She tried frantically to pry herself free, but soon the fire in her began to waver weakly and he, in all his skeletal strength, pulled harder. Her eyes began to snap shut in desperation.

She jumped when she heard another blast and felt the swift heat of a projectile fly by. Then a shout and the grip at her wrist had fallen with the body it was attached to. Sister Maria opened her eyes to see the priest keeling over in pain, a stained hand clutching his wet crimson arm.

She barely had time to regain her senses when she felt a weight fall upon her shoulder.

"Come with me," said the voice it belonged to, and she didn't hesitate to take the hand and urge it to go forward.

The grasp was hauntingly wiry, yet it kept gentle no matter how hard it held on to her. She looked back for the duration of the run – across the fiery battlefield of the front of the convent and among the men who shot forward and the beginning entry of the _guardia civil_, and to her the uniforms of the latter and the tattered array of the former did not matter or tell anyone anything – in anarchy, it was all the same.

All she felt was the faithful hold while she clutched the _bayong_ to her side while they sprinted, flew, away from Santa Clara and into a back alley nearby and into a waiting calesa.

She set herself independently on one side while the exhaustion began to trickle slowly into her system, and the rhythm of her catching her breath set itself to the soft clatter of the vehicle. For the first time in years she felt a smile trace across her lips. Finally, she was free.

Once as they rode her gaze trailed toward the man beside her. The gloom kept her from seeing anymore than the deep contrasts of his countenance, rising and falling slowly to breath, with hair so long and dark it looked as if his face were framed by the night.

She looked away immediately and instinctively. She did not take note of the fact that he was still holding her hand.


	4. Chapter 3

"I didn't have the chance to thank you yet."

Her voice rang crystalline through his consciousness, forcing him to look up at the white-dressed figure in front of him. _No_, he reminded himself, _it wasn't a dream_.

Simoun was standing in the flat, solid as a stone, and all this was very much real. The way the light skimmed upon her marble-like, familiar face was all too vivid, all too warm to be one of the visions that threw his soul back into his body at night, crying, awake, and in a cold, haunted sweat.

He snapped out of his reverie, feeling an alien thumping within his chest that ached and at the same time pulled the corners of his mouth into an equally long-unknown smile. The beat grew faster as he stumbled to speak, and the smile melted into a word-shaping mess.

"It's alright," he said. Then he realized, her gaze was alien as well. The way she looked at him then and there was not of a remembered, decade-long love. It was of a novel gratefulness, a shy naiveté that bothered her because she did not yet know whether to fully trust him or not.

"You don't recognize me," he finally said, waiting for an answer.

She shrugged earnestly, her smile fading. "It's not every day I encounter men whose eyes I cannot see."

His eyes trailed to the floor, alarmed yet with the appearance of failure. _What is all this for if I am no longer anyone for her? She thinks I am dead. What am I to her now? How long do I have to wait until she loves me again?_

He did not see that she was, delicately and involuntarily, making her way towards him. He only saw Maria's dark brown eyes set upon him as she scanned his face for any trace of recognition. A small white hand pulled away any dark strands of hair from his tanned forehead. Simoun couldn't help but close his eyes when she laid another hand on his cheek.

He felt the frames of his spectacles slip slowly from behind his ears and he instinctively stopped her hands, but he stopped and led her reassuringly as she pulled them away.

She saw neither cold nor blind eyes but dark ones, like hers, that were deep with age.

She felt them boring into her own, into her soul, pleading and begging that she remember. It brought back so many memories – that day on the _azotea_ when none of them had seen him for a year, and here he was, educated and clad in all this European attire; seeing him emerge triumphant after they thought the crocodile had gotten him for sure; the sadness and desperation when all of it began to rip apart.

She knew she recognized him when her eyes welled and tears began to stream, heavy and long-due, down her cheeks.

She kissed him, once and finally, her whole body shaking with so much poignancy she felt like screaming.

_I thought you were dead!_

_Oh God, I thought I was never going to see you again!_

_Why now! Why only now!_

There were so many things she wanted to throw at him that she had saved up in thirteen years waiting for someone she thought would never come. But she only held him tight; so tight she wanted to meld into him and so tight she thought she would never let go again, crying for so long she thought she was breaking.

"I love you," he whispered and cut the sorrowful silence.

She tried to murmur it back, and yet all that came was a wrenching sob. He shushed her gently and held her back, and it was like this for a while until they both stopped weeping.


	5. Epilogue

She woke up to see his figure hunched under the glaringly cold light of the moon. He'd left the windows open that evening for her, even if she told him she had gotten used to shadowed nights. One hand was pressed to his temple. Maria watched him for a while before she saw his shoulders shudder and his breath break.

She sat up and laid her hand on his shoulder, startling him. She took one of his hands in her free one and gently asked, "Dream?"

Simoun turned to her, eyes red although he tried to smile. "It wasn't very pleasant."

As she held herself out he fell into her, sobbing like a child. She clutched him tight and he dug his head deeper into her neck.

After a time, he surfaced, brushing his tears into his sleeve and looking endearingly at her, so strong and wizened now although she thought she had done so much wrong.

They smiled and he leaned his forehead on hers, where they stayed until they thought it was time to lie down.


End file.
